If you are here for BREIT analysis, hang in there, it’s coming. Since my day job involves managing a REIT ETF (which, btw, was launched specifically in response to these non-traded REIT issues), the good compliance people are worried about Finra’s rule 2210(d)(2), a short and vaguely worded rule that outlaws direct fund comparisons in anything deemed to be marketing material. But fear not, REIT Heads, we’ll craft the perfect disclosure language that will absolve us of any 2210(d)(2) sins. It’s all coming.
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I’ve been blessed with two sons and a daughter. I can’t say I’ve had a perfect personal life, or even a perfect family life. I’ve had my trials. I’ve had my belly-of-the-whale moment. But I’ve also been blessed beyond anything I earned or deserve with wonderful children.
My sons are 15 and 13. Big Man is the little one. He is battling a restless mind that is not built for the classroom, and I think he is going to win that battle. He started high school this year and joined the theater group. He wants to be a great actor. I woke up early one day last weekend and heard screaming in the basement. I went downstairs to see what it was, and there he was, practicing a monologue. At 6:00 am on a Sunday.
Little Man is the big one. He is warm and gentle and kind, and an absolute savage on the football field. He plays center and edge rusher on his 8th grade team and dreams day and night about starting for the local high school team. Besides football, he loves business and markets and wants more than anything to understand what his father does all day. We watch shark tank and listen to How I Built This and talk business all the time. He is going to fight the long odds of making it in football until he fights the long odds of making it in business.
My sons hear a lot about privilege. They hear it in school, they hear it on social media apps, they hear it everywhere they go. It is in the zeitgeist, and it’s in the language of our culture. The concept has been delivered to them, and they’ve been told that challenging it carries a social stigma that only the cruelest would dare carry.
To be clear, my boys are privileged. You can check every demographic category that carries the designation. They have a family that loves them. They have role models in their larger family circle that includes hard working, kind and successful people in nearly every field. And while I myself am still waiting for when my ship comes in, along the road of entrepreneurial failures I’ve managed a few successes too. I’ve been able to provide.
We don’t often talk about these things. We talk about the Detroit Lions. We talk about what to have for dinner. We don’t talk about the real stuff.
But it came up in conversation the other night. Privilege. White privilege, male privilege, upper middle class privilege, US citizen privilege, they have so much privilege.
And I reminded them that they do. That we can talk about equality of outcome all we want, but the playing field is not level, not even close. Not everyone will get the opportunities they will, not everyone has a full stomach and a warm bed, not everyone can think about college without the burden of supporting people around them - let alone being supported. And on and on.
But, I told them, they must not feel shame or guilt. Understanding privilege means being empathetic and appreciative, but whatever life has given them to start with they have an obligation not to waste. They have to build upon it. Compound it. They must push themselves and challenge themselves and work hard and force themselves to become great in any and every way they can.
And I could see their eyes swell up. I could feel their relief. Like they have been given permission to try to be great. For the first time. They’ve been given permission not to hold themselves back.
And I keep thinking about this conversation. About how their privilege could be an anchor, how it could be a sail.
And that if we can’t tell our sons to become great we are finished as a great society.
Totally agree with this: "but whatever life has given them to start with they have an obligation not to waste. They have to build upon it. Compound it. They must push themselves and challenge themselves and work hard and force themselves to become great in any and every way they can."
Equally important I think is that because you are given all these things, while you are pursuing your goals/dreams, you also have an obligation to help those who are less privileged.
Lions gonna make the playoffs bubba!!! Let's gooo! (Rooting for them after the Ravens of course)